FAA delays decision on airport tower closings

Friday

Mar 15, 2013 at 7:19 PMMar 15, 2013 at 9:00 PM

RICHARD CONNSTAFF WRITER

The Federal Aviation Administration has said it will now decide Thursday whether air traffic control towers at 173 airports throughout the U.S., including those in New Smyrna Beach and Ormond Beach, will be closed. The FAA originally said it would notify airports nationwide Monday of its decision. However, Rhonda Walker, manager of the New Smyrna Beach Municipal Airport, said she received a letter Friday from the agency stating it had to delay the decision because of the large volume of responses it received from communities that have control towers on the chopping block.The 173 towers are slated to close April 7, as part of $600 million in planned cuts to the FAA's budget. Those responses include reasons from each city why its control tower should remain open.Ormond Beach officials pointed out their airport, with a flight operation every minute and 37 seconds, is the nation's fourth busiest and is a permanent base for a national air defense training program. In New Smyrna Beach's case, city officials sent a letter to the FAA earlier this week, arguing in part that closing the tower would lead to a reduction in safety at the airfield and more congestion at Daytona Beach International Airport. New Smyrna Beach Municipal Airport is considered a reliever airport for Daytona Beach. "We think we put a pretty good case together for how losing the tower would have a negative impact on the national air traffic scene," said Alan Norris, chairman of the city's Airport Advisory Board. The advisory board and City Commission have scheduled a joint meeting at 5 p.m. March 26, at City Hall, 210 Sams Ave., a session Walker said will take place regardless of whether the tower continues to be targeted for closure. The meeting will focus on what the city should do with a $290,000, four-year study analyzing noise and air traffic levels at the airport. The city submitted that study to the FAA as a necessary step for it to be able to implement mandatory rules to reduce noise at the airport. An FAA official, however, recommended in January that the city should not submit a formal plan designed to establish noise restrictions at the airport. The decision in part was based on a decline in flight traffic over the past several years — and therefore noise levels — at the airfield. In 2008, there were 178,396 takeoffs and landings recorded at the airport. In 2011, that number dipped to 128,795. Last year, such operations jumped to 138,226. The FAA said in a letter to the city that there was a "significant discrepancy" between the aviation forecasts used in the study's noise exposure maps and actual flight traffic at the airport. Walker said the city could redo the study looking at noise and traffic levels at the airfield, but for now, the numbers don't seem to be there to support it. "That's going to be the question," she said. "Do we want to go back and spend the money to redo the (study), with less traffic than we had five years ago and much less traffic than what we projected?" The number of takeoffs and landings at the airport increased in January and February and is also on the upswing in March, Walker said. If those numbers hold up, it would put the airfield on track for about 164,000 operations this year, she said. "What we would probably do after the end of the year is look at our operations and see if at that time they are comparable to what we submitted to the FAA," she said. "If that were the case, then we could go back and submit them because we would be able to show that, yes, we had the number of operations that we projected."